As I touched on yesterday, I’ve been doing a lot be behind-the-scenes work over here. The mostly-white blog layout was driving me batty, as were the outdated pictures in the Our House and Source List pages. (We won’t even mention the long-overlooked typos in the Source List page that made me blush like a 14 year old girl talking to her crush.)

I’ve started to add a feature on the Design Boards page that takes you to a page with more details about the room, as well as a cost breakdown. Think of it as an Easter Egg, like DVDs used to have (possibly still do? I don’t know, we don’t buy DVDs anymore). So far just the kitchen has this semi-hidden feature, because today on my lunch break I noticed that suddenly all my photos look horizontally squished on my 23″ monitor at work. Which is weird because things seem fine on my 23″ monitor at home, and on my 15″ (or is it 17″?) laptop. I may have to size all my photos down slightly. Make note: Project ADD isn’t limited to actual projects.

I am cutting myself some slack for certain things, like the fact that the most recent photos were taken at night with the curtains closed. Other than blogging and trying to keep the house clean, Robert & I both work 40+ hours a week, and Robert goes to school. I’m not going to get all “Look there’s a dish on my counter! We’re keepin’ it real!” on you (although, there are dishes drying above if you look closely). I know we won’t always have perfect lighting, that’s why there are things like different camera settings and white balance. I’m working on learning our camera better, and making sure our photos from here on out are better quality.

There are other things I’m not cutting myself some slack on. Things like all time times I’ve said “photos of/details on that coming soon!” and never gotten back to y’all have me feeling like a bad blogger. Going through the archives trying to get things more organized is cringe worthy, and has made me realize I owe y’all a lot of project details. Off the top of my head I know I never got back to talking about the kitchen curtain, the bedroom curtains, the living room curtains, the tile around the front door, the paint below the chair rail in the dining room, the kitchen floor, or the chairs we were working on for the Art Room. Some of those projects have stalled (not unlike the guest bathroom and the back patio), but others I simply forgot, or got gung-ho about the next project before posting about the first one. Color me embarrassed.

I’ll be working on getting those old projects on the blog in the coming weeks/months, while also trying to work on our stalled projects. (I’m looking at you, Closet Office, Guest Bathroom, and Back Patio.) Hopefully the result of all of this is a better organized blog with more content. I’ll be checking some of these goals off in my 25 Before 25 list, which I’ve set up in a section called Our Goals. (You can find the button on the sidebar. After I turn 25 we’ll either have seasonal goals or the section with disappear again.) Currently I’m 9/25 though another five are in the works. Things like the bathroom, patio, and trip to DC are not feasible, but I kind of expected that in the original post.

So. Is there anything I promised to post about but never made good on that you’re curious about? Do photos in past posts look squished on your monitors? (I fixed the Our House and Source List pages, but the individual posts are going to take a while.)

I think the header font only works on certain browsers at the moment.

So this is a belated PSA to say that we are now self-hosted (woo!), aaaaand so you may not receive posts email anymore (oops!). But I added a schmancy button for the our new Feedburner emails over on the sidebar. It’s the one shaped like an envelope, next to the RSS icon. (Which might be confusing, because it probably looks like it’s meant for you to use to email us. But it’s not. I walk on wild side with things like that. Also, there is an Contact button further down the sidebar.)

I’m still new to this whole self-hosted thing, so some kinks still need to be smoothed out. How are things working on your end? Let me know. And then tell me how to fix them! (I’m only sort of kidding.)

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For those of you with no interest in things like The Twitter, here is the light preview I posted. (The coffee cup beside it is sort of an inside-but-not-really-if-you-read-her-blog joke for Emily at Merrypad. And if you don’t read her blog? Yeah, get on that.)

It’s basically a DIY version of the West Elm Globe Pendant (currently on sale for $79.99, whiiiich incidentally is less than my version cost), but I’m incredibly picky, so of course I didn’t want to just buy one. That’s too easy. Details/tutorial coming soon!

What have y’all been up to lately?

As a refresher, we previously planned to DIY a version of West Elm’s (now discontinued) Chunky Console, and we last talked about the entryway plans in a guest post on The Lil House That Could. At that time things looked like this:

nightstand and much-too-small shoe basket

very sad placeholder “console”

So with hopes of getting rid of the eyesore stools, we set our sites on the tiled wall.  Finding a console table that we liked was pretty much impossible because the wall is only 36 inches long, so we figured we’d have to go the DIY route. Enter my Entryway Inspiration board. (Sidenote for anyone new here: I’m kind of a Pinterest addict. I have 45 boards and 2600+ pins. Yikes.)

As I alluded to in the last Pinterest Partayy post, we liked the idea of something sleek, with a chunky wooden top, and were possibly considering wall-mounting it.

from BHG

from Our Midcentury

We had some hairpin legs lying around from a former desk idea in the art room. (I won’t get into my rant about the source we bought them from, but suffice to say we will be making our own next time.) After looking at all the options available in non-pressure treated lumber, we decided make the top from oak 3x3s. Preferably we’d have used non-pressure treated 4x4s, but there weren’t any available in our area. So, after a bit of driving around research (did you catch what I did there, Jami?) we discovered that Home Depot’s 3x3s are a quarter inch wider, but only 30 inches long. The ones from Lowe’s are slightly narrower but come in precut 36 inch long lengths. Sold.

While at Home Depot we also picked up some hardware for attaching the 3x3s together and to the wall. I’m not sure if they’re meant to be used in new construction or if they’re some kind of hurricane straps for mobile homes, but either way, these suckers are heavy duty. And we like overkill around here.

After gluing, clamping and bracketing the 3x3s together that sucker was solid. And heavy. (You wouldn’t want to, say, drop it on your toes when holding it against the wall to see how it’s going to look. You know, hypothetically.) At this point, Robert also oiled the oak with Watco Danish Oil in Natural, and primed & painted the tile wall (using Valspar’s Grand Hotel Mackinac Blue).

Then we attached the legs, and mounted it to the tile wall. We killed several drill bits during this project. Robert tells me there is one actually stuck inside the table top, and we pretty much trashed a glass/ceramic/tile bit, as well as a Tapcon bit while drilling into the wall. As it turns out, the tile we’ve been wanting to remove or recover for a while now? Yeah, that’s actually over brick or brick veneer. So at some point the table we just put up will come down, we’ll demo the tile and assess the condition of the brick. If it’s completely trashed we’ll still end up drywalling over it. Fingers crossed for some lovely exposed brick. But I digress.

Robert drilled 12 holes into the tile/brick. He started each hole with the glass/ceramic bit, and finished it off with the Tapcon bit. The block you see on the completed L-bracket is there to hold the table top slightly above the top of the bracket. That way we didn’t have to cut the bracket down to fit the height of our table top, and we could use all the holes in the bracket so the table was super-secure.

Once the table was mounted to the wall we added a mirror from our wishlist that we received as a Christmas gift, and we’re considering adding a few framed photos as well.

We plan to add a coat/purse hook or two to that side tiled wall (the one by the old doorbell chime that we need to remove).

I love the way it turned out, and how it flows into the dining room, with the new chairs and china hutch.

Did you tackle a Pinterest inspired project, too? We’d love it if you shared it with us! And don’t forget to stop by What the Graham, Baby Gators Den, Design Build Love, Merrypad, Mrs Priss, and The Stucco Bungalow to see what they’ve done and link your project on their sites as well!

Extra credit: It would be nice if you linked back to this post, or one of the lovely ladies above, but it’s totally not required. Also, feel free to snag this graphic for your post if you like:

Having said that, we’re starting to get to the point with our house where we want to swap out a few pieces to make our home fit our style better.

If you follow me on Pinterest you may have noticed me pining for a set of metal Tolix style chairs. I thought they’d look great with our existing table that I bought with my grandma years ago. I finally found two reproduction chairs I thought were perfect, but I could never pull the trigger on them (I even missed a sale on the chairs on the left - $79/each with free shipping).

left from Home Decorators, right from Industry-West

After seeing Kara Paslay’s new Eames chairs the idea of mid-century modern chairs with a farmhouse table was planted in the back of my mind. Our table is very much like the one Kara has, though the base of our table is dark green instead of white.

 Kara Paslay’s dining room

I came up with this design board for our dining room. The room is already painted (I’ve been a bad blogger and haven’t shared any daytime shots of the green below the chairrail), the light was a DIY about a year ago, you saw the chairs here, and the rug will be moved from the living room. As for the other bits, I’ve been lusting after that vase for quite a while, and I’ve been toying with the idea of adding french doors & a faux transom between the living room and dining room.

Here’s how it turned out:

yes, the Christmas decorations are still up

Since we swiped the living room rug, we picked up a replacement from RugsUSA.com. It was 50% off, and with some Paypal money from Etsy and eBay sales we only spent $49.

Morroccan Trellis Rug Navy

please ignore the squished couch cushions

I’d love to add some better lighting behind the couch and over the round table (which has taken the place of the rectangular one in front of the birch trees), but we have some things to take care of first (you know, the bathroom, and our Pinterest Partayy project).

What have y’all been up to?

If you read What The Graham (and if you don’t, you should!) you might have heard a little something about the Pinterest Partayy Jami is spearheading. Robert & I aren’t typically big on resolutions, but we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to start the year off right with a completed project (and maybe a chance to check another thing off my 25-before-25 list).

Here’s a little preview of what we’re going to be tackling.

from BHG

from Our Midcentury

seen on YHL

If you’d like to join us, we’re going to be linking our Pinterest inspired projects up on the 15th (two weeks from now). You can either come back here, visit one of the other lovely ladies’ blogs (Baby Gators Den, Design Build Love, Merrypad, Mrs Priss, The Stucco Bungalow and of course What the Graham) to link up, or both!

Happy New Year, y’all! Did anyone make resolutions?

Yes, I did just mix a farmhouse table, (knock off) midcentury modern chairs, and a Craigslist Italian provincial china cabinet. I loved all three pieces, and I think it just might be crazy enough to work. I would say Pinterest made me do it, but we all know I’m one who doesn’t really care what other people think.

I’ll be back soon with another post about the dining room, as well as some other updates we’re working on.

Over my long weekend I decided two things: 1) I want a new china cabinet because the bookcase + secretary (below, before I painted it) that we’ve been using isn’t cutting it anymore. The two above are less than $100 on Craigslist, and Robert is going to look at one of them today. 2) My husband has serious opinions about wildlife china cabinets.

Last year I had our wreath hung up, I added snowflakes to the front windows (using Gel Gloss since Gold Seal Glass Wax is impossible to find), and decorated the (incredibly expensive) tree while listening to the soundtracks of A Charlie Brown Christmas and the Nutcracker.

I have about 8 more of these snowflake stencils, anyone want one?

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A month or so ago I tried to prod myself into the Christmas spirit by decorating the mantel. I called it a winter mantel, to fool myself into thinking it was ok that I didn’t feel very festive. I broke out lots of blue, mercury glass, and used Sara’s flameless candle insulator trick. Halfway through I gave up, plunked my garnet & gold Bowden flakes on the right hand side, and went to Home Depot. I figured we’d replace it with something more festive when the inspiration came. They’re still there.

We worship the church of football, so that makes it ok, right?

While writing this You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch came on my Nat King Cole (Holiday) Pandora station. I gave it a thumbs up.

I mentioned earlier that we finally brought our Christmas tree inside, but it’s not decorated yet. Fortunately this year’s tree was about half the cost of last year’s, so that part makes me feel a bit better.

As for why I’m not in the holiday mood… Let’s just say it’s been a tough year. Some of my Twitter friends know part of the story, and I talked a little about part of it in veiled terms here. Mostly it’s a combination of factors.

Here’s hoping the new year is merry & bright.

*Sprite because when we Googled tree preservative recipes it suggested a tad of chlorine-free bleach, caffeine-free lemon-lime soda, or epsom salts in addition to warm water. So we used all of the above.